Searching subversion history (full text)

Is there a way to perform a full text search of a subversion repository, including all the history?

For example, I've written a feature that I used somewhere, but then it wasn't needed, so I svn rm'd the files, but now I need to find it again to use it for something else. The svn log probably says something like "removed unused stuff", and there's loads of checkins like that.

Edit 2016-04-15: Please note that what is asked here by the term "full text search", is to search the actual diffs of the commit history, and not filenames and/or commit messages. I'm pointing this out because the author's phrasing above does not reflect that very well - since in his example he might as well be only looking for a filename and/or commit message. Hence a lot of the svn log answers and comments.

git svn clone <svn url>

git log -G<some regex>

svn log in Apache Subversion 1.8 supports a new --search option. So you can search Subversion repository history log messages without using 3'rd party tools and scripts.

svn log --search searches in author, date, log message text and list of changed paths.

See SVNBook | svn log command-line reference.

If you are running Windows have a look at SvnQuery. It maintains a full text index of local or remote repositories. Every document ever committed to a repository gets indexed. You can do google-like queries from a simple web interface.

I'm using a small shellscript, but this only works for a single file. You can ofcourse combine this with find to include more files.

#!/bin/bash
for REV in `svn log $1 | grep ^r[0-9] | awk '{print $1}'`; do 
  svn cat $1 -r $REV | grep -q $2
  if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then 
    echo "$REV"
  fi 
done

If you really want to search everything, use the svnadmin dump command and grep through that.

The best way that I've found to do this is with less:

svn log --verbose | less

Once less comes up with output, you can hit / to search, like VIM.

Edit:

According to the author, he wants to search more than just the messages and the file names. In which case you will be required to ghetto-hack it together with something like:

svn diff -r0:HEAD | less

You can also substitute grep or something else to do the searching for you. If you want to use this on a sub-directory of the repository, you will need to use svn log to discern the first revision in which that directory existed, and use that revision instead of 0.